Another great thread at BC!

Remember, guys, that you can’t discuss what ails America’s manufacturing sector without keeping the layers and layers of environmental regulations piled on the energy and manufacturing industries since the early seventies firmly in mind.

Even service sectors like transportation which utilize energy were subject to legislated perversions. In short, no matter how effective your manufacturing, construction or transportation business plan was in, say, 1978, the unpredictable artificial price-increases that wet-lands preservation, Coastal Commissions, CAFE standards and drilling moratoriums that emit from increasingly abstract legislation are sure to have obsoleted it by now.

Study rent-seeking by uncompetitive firms in Europe, and you may begin to wonder whether impacting a competitor’s biz plan isn’t the legislators’ desired outcome.

Which leads me to one critique of Steyn’s observation vis the financial sector: the rent-seeking that overloaded the system was mediated by government regulators motivated by similarly abstract welfarism. Otherwise, his points are right on.

Environmentalism and welfarism are the wheels on the Left’s market-busting bike. Let’s make sure that, as we delve into the whys, wheres and whos of the economic melt-down, we shove a stick into the spokes of the Left’s wheels.